In fact, this was one of the first printed Persian newspapers IN THE WORLD, not just India! And actually, it was NOT the very first, there were others 🗞️ Important to point out because the role of Calcutta is often lost in some accounts of the history of modern news in Persian...
As it happens, just two weeks before the release of Rammohan Roy's Mirʾāt al-Akhbār, another Bengali Hindu named Hurryhar (Harihar) Dutta began editing the Jām-e Jahān Namā, first issued on March 28, 1822. Here's from S.C. Sanial's "First Persian Newspapers in India" (1934): 
But these are only the ones that left behind surviving copies! Allegedly, there were some even earlier Persian newspapers in the late-1700s, according to Margarita Barns in her book "The Indian Press" (1940), p. 111
The first Persian newspaper in Iran, Kāghaz-e Akhbār, was released in May 1837 by Mīrzā Ṣāleḥ Shīrāzī. It was issued monthly, and ran for just about two years or so.
More significant historically was Akhtar, the first Persian newspaper in the Ottoman world. Published by expat Iranians in Istanbul, it was issued weekly (or more often) from January 13, 1876 and ran for two decades. It is now digitized, open-access! digitale-sammlungen.ulb.uni-bonn.de/ulbbnioa/perio…
On Akhtar's influence on media politics within Iran, see: ias.edu/ideas/2016/nab…
Note that Akhtar is sometimes mistakenly described as "the first Persian newspaper to be published outside Iran," an error that may be attributed to the Encyclopaedia Iranica entry of 1984: iranicaonline.org/articles/aktar…
That's a grossly inaccurate claim (and reflects a now-common tendency to forget the role of Persian in India!). At various times in the 1830s, there were AT LEAST 5⃣ Persian newspapers being published in Calcutta alone, and at least one in Ludhiana. Here's Barns again, p. 230:
Calcutta would continue to play a major role in this history: Ḥabl al-matīn, one of THE most important Persian newspapers of the modern era, was published there from 1893 until 1930. They also briefly published newspapers in Tehran and Rasht, between 1906 and 1909.
"In addition to Muslims in Persia and India, Ḥabl al-matīn had many readers in Afghanistan, Central Asia, the Caucasus, and the Ottoman Empire." iranicaonline.org/articles/habl-…
In the 1920s, the publication of Ḥabl al-matīn was managed by a woman named Fakhkr al-Sulṭān, who signed as F. S. Moʾayyedzāda, "deputy editor." She was the daughter of the paper's founding editor Sayyid Jalāl al-Dīn Kāshānī (Moʾayyed al-Islām).
Back to Rammohan, he was also involved with 4 other periodicals: Bengal Gejeti (Bengali, 1818), The Brahmunical Magazine (English–Bengali, 1821), Sambad Kaumidi (Bengali, 1821), Bengal Herald (English, 1829). From the link in above Madras Courier article: tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
Calcutta was thus the birthplace of news in several languages: Bengali, Persian, Urdu & Hindi. The first Urdu news began as a supplement to aforementioned Jām-e Jahān Namā, but didn't last long! Apparently, "even Indian gentlemen...have a predilection for Persian" 😂 From Sanial:
It's also worth noting that in his Appeal to the King-in-Council to protest the colonial Press Ordinance of 1823, Rammohan Roy refers to the Mughal office of akhbār nawīs (news-writers), alongside his interesting rhetorical strategy of an "even-they-weren't-so-despotic" argument!
While a sort of precursor to newspapers, the work of such Mughal newswriters was decisively not "mass media." See Michael Fisher's 1993 paper, "The Office of Akhbār Nawīs: The Transition from Mughal to British Forms." jstor.org/stable/312878
Lastly, the role of Perso-Arabic and Islamic learning in Rammohan Roy's life and thought deserves a whole separate discussion, perhaps a subject for another thread! Finis/تمام شد
